Facebook expands online sharing with 60 partners

Bloomberg

Facebook Inc is adding more than 60 partners to a service that lets users tell friends what they are currently doing online, from listening to music to reading news.

The company is working with Pinterest, Ticketmaster, Rotten Tomatoes and other applications to let users publish their activities on their Facebook pages, Carl Sjogreen, director of platform products, said at an event in San Francisco on Wednesday.

For instance, if someone is researching a travel spot on TripAdvisor, they could post the details to Facebook.

Facebook, the most popular -social-networking service, wants to open up new opportunities for advertising and get people to spend more time using its features. The new partnerships also help make Facebook more of a media hub, ramping up competition with Google Inc and Apple Inc.

“We believe this is the beginning of a new wave of apps,” Sjogreen said. “We’re really excited about the potential.”

With the so-called open-graph system, which was updated last year, users have already been able to use Spotify Ltd’s service to show the songs they’re playing and Washington Post Co’s sites to share news items.

The platform is now being opened up to all developers, Sjogreen said. The activities can be seen on three parts of Facebook’s site: the Ticker, News Feed and Timeline. Other partners include Foodspotting, the Kobo electronic-book service and the Gogobot travel site.

The service lets Facebook developers create applications that are better customized to their users, said Andrew Dreskin, chief executive officer of San Francisco startup Ticketfly Inc, another partner.

“They are looking to make the platform more flexible and have it all make more sense in terms of the actions consumers are taking and how they describe those actions,” Dreskin said. “It’s the evolution of Facebook.”

Ticketfly, which sells tickets to music concerts and other events, has added new buttons to its Web site to let users “Like” specific artists on Facebook after they purchase tickets.

Visitors to the site also can click on new buttons to indicate “I’m Seeing” a band to their friends on Facebook, Dreskin said.

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